


Agents of any movement

by mayachain



Category: Haven - Fandom
Genre: Character Study, Crocker legacy, Cuddling & Snuggling, Multi, Nightmares, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 15:29:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayachain/pseuds/mayachain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Having been given a reprieve is no guarantee for peaceful nights.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Agents of any movement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [afrikate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrikate/gifts).



> Happy yuletide, **afrikate!** I hope you enjoy this humble gift, and that you don't mind me keeping it to a vague late season 3 AU as I have yet seen very little of season 4. A huge thank you must go to my diligent betas. Thank you all - you, **afrikate** , for your prompt, and **silksieve** and **ghostonfilm** for your help and input - as well as for the experience!
> 
> Title from quote: "I am pockmarked with whole-body pinpricks of potentiality. A stretch of my body would surely stretch as far as the sky. The whole universe poised, and I am the agent of any movement." - Binyavanga Wainaina

**~~T minus 5 days~~ T minus 181 days**

_She steps out of a barn and…_ nothing _. Part of her recognizes woodland inside the fog. Greenery. She identifies the salt of the sea, but other than that – nothing. She whirls around but the door she came through has already slammed shut. There should have been a noise but there was none; the door is simply closed and will not open again._

 _It doesn’t look like a place she’d_ want _to go back into - black and looming and ominous and ready to fall down any moment; yet – eternal. A living black hole._

_She turns back to the woods and tries to make out a path through the fog. Should she call out for help? Would anybody hear? Where can she go?_

_Staggering forward as best she can, she tries to come up with a single memory. Nothing in her pockets to help her, no phone, no sliver of paper. She almost steps into a puddle, stops herself from stumbling. Seeing a chance she kneels down and makes out her reflection in the bad light: the image of the woman who must be she. When she tries for a single coherent thought on what she is seeing, everything is_ blank -

Audrey wakes with a gasp. For a moment, her world is as blank as before she opened her eyes. 

A body shifts closer to her from her right side. A sleepy voice, a man’s voice, cuts through her terrified breathing and the rest of the night. “Parker?”

To her left, a second body stirs, moves closer toward her before its owner is even fully awake. “Audrey?” 

Her bed. The apartment above the Gull. Home.

Audrey Parker.

A name, an identity, a history someone – something? – gave her. Stole. Memories she made on the basis of that identity all on her own.

A barn she was, and still is, supposed to disappear into. Nathan. Duke.

Who have shifted even closer. Close enough that it’ll soon get too warm to lie together like this. Audrey can’t bring herself to care. If it becomes too much, Duke’s arm – not the one that’s wrapped around her – will fumble for the blanket and pull it off.

She cannot help but wonder if Lucy ever had nightmares of barns and non-existent memories. If Sarah did. If either of them was left feeling so much worse than Audrey, now, because they were alone in their bed. And if the knowledge and the sense of the life inside her had been enough to comfort Sarah, sometimes.

Her men have become adept at waiting her out. This is the third time that she’s woken them like this since they fell into bed in celebration of the Hunter’s significantly slowed approach. They don’t expect or want an apology, and she doesn’t want to talk about it, wants to forget the terrifying all-consuming blankness for as long as she can, as fast as she can, but – 

“Tell me it won’t happen.”

“It won’t happen,” Nathan affirms immediately. He pulls her fully into his arms while Duke shifts to half cover her, pressing her further against Nathan, Duke's legs tangling with hers. 

According to very confused astronomers, something has granted Audrey Parker five more months. The Hunter has shifted from mystical to an – “in all likelihood” – not Earth-threatening surprise to the outside world.

Duke’s head is heavy on her shoulder, his breath hot against her neck. “Never. _Never._ ” His so-often mischievous voice shows no trace of levity.

The pragmatic part of Audrey knows that she’s listening to promises Duke and Nathan might not be able to keep. They don’t know if a Trouble or something they did prompted the reprieve, much less if it can happen again. Nathan may be in denial and Duke may cling to his stubbornness – deep down they both know she may still have to go. The part of Audrey that dreamed of being alone in the world without knowledge of self or a single ally doesn’t care because her men will _try._ Held close by them, protected between them when all her childhood memories – _hers_ because she is shaping herself on their basis – are of being in the dark, alone… She feels safe.

 

**~~T plus 8 days~~ T minus 166 days**

_He is standing in the field behind Meg’s garden shed and blinking at the setting sun. There are no sounds around him, even though the gulls circling overhead should be screaming up a storm. Something is not right. Duke looks down with a marked sense of dread._

_There are people collapsed on the ground. Bill is among them; Marion, Beatty, Harry Nix, Kyle Hopkins, too, all looking as if someone cut their strings and they fell onto the wilted grass, asleep. Ginger is curled into a ball next to Jordan and Dwight. Moira is holding Noelle’s hand._

_Duke doesn’t have to kneel down and take pulses to know that they’re all dead. He knows it even before he becomes aware of the knife by his boot._

_‘So little blood,’ he thinks. Standing in a field full of bodies of people dead by his hand, he cannot honestly tell if a single one of those kills was justified. He can’t recall ever considering murdering Ginger, but there she is with her face half obscured by her cap, so there must have been a reason._

_Looking around he almost expects Dad’s ghost, or the Rev’s, to nod at him approvingly from the sidelines. There are no ghosts. Only bodies. Duke is all alone. He is all alone because half hidden underneath the bodies of Marion and old man Wuornos is_ Nathan – 

Duke opens his eyes and is out of the bed in a single motion. The jostle to the mattress is enough to wake Audrey. She reaches a hand out towards him in the semidarkness but lets it drop once she sees how shaken he is. She holds his gaze for a moment and then rearranges the king sized blanket around herself and Nathan as Duke slips from the bedroom.

If he were on the _Rouge_ he’d go above deck and seek out the perfect spot to hold his face in the breeze. Fix himself a drink. As it is, he swipes a beer on his way out and sits down at an empty table on the Gull’s terrace. He knows that if he starts walking, there is no telling when or where or even if he might stop. With Nathan and Audrey upstairs, he doesn’t really want to go far, not when there’s every possibility that Audrey, at least, is waiting up. _Just… a little while to myself to clear my head._

He’d been quite happy believing that Nathan would be the one with the nightmares.

Every time a new Trouble soars up, he can’t help but wonder if this is the time Audrey’s intuition either fails or simply isn’t enough. The time when the Crocker legacy becomes the only means to stop the threat to the citizens of Haven until the Hunter comes, and Audrey walks into the Barn. 

In the event that a kill is inevitable, it makes the most sense for Duke to take the life. _Be happy to let one of the deputies do it,_ because then he wouldn’t have to worry about his - his! – police officers’ coping afterwards. 

The point is moot as long as death by Crocker means peace for future generations. 

Duke doesn’t like doubting Audrey’s Trouble-wrangling abilities or Nathan’s diligence, but the precedent is already set. It’s no coincidence that he saw Hopkins and Nix on that thrice-damned field.

He sips his beer thinking about Audrey and Nathan in the apartment Audrey still pays him rent for, even though he and Nathan spend the night there more often than not. A few weeks ago he was standing right there when Sarah shot Roy. _Lucy was holding my hand only days after Dad was murdered_. Before she disappeared and left Nathan as about the only constant in Duke's life.

Simon had been a lot more eager to put down the Troubled than Roy, at least toward the end. Audrey, for as long as he and Nathan got to keep her, would do her best to stop Duke if he lost focus like Dad. Not that he’d ever wish her to have to, she who had always believed in him. 

The empty bottle clanks against wood.

When he goes back inside, he can’t help the smile that crosses his face when Audrey - _She waited!_ – lifts her head off Nathan’s shoulder and holds up the blanket for him. They have moved enough to one side of the bed that there is space for him to lie down without touching. Nathan has woken up in Duke’s absence. He’s blinking at Duke now but is probably less sleepy than he tries to let on. “I won’t let you.”

Four words that used to imply the worst about Duke for the longest time. As Duke crawls back into bed, those same words go far to boost his confidence. _I get my way, you won’t have to prevent me from realizing my so-called potential._ He’s not about to hand Nathan a reason to hate him again.

None of them might have all the choices they’d like in the end. But Nathan is here, and Audrey is here, and Duke will fight to keep them for as long as he can. This, the three of them in Audrey’s apartment above Duke’s bar in Nathan’s police precinct, is safe. For now. 

 

**~~T plus 18 days~~ T minus 157 days**

_Audrey is gone. They did everything they could possibly think of, turned over every stone, asked people who’d be more than content to just shoot them for help, went through every obscure stack of letters they could dredge up from somewhere. Three people against the world held onto each other with all their might. It wasn’t enough. Audrey is gone. The Hunter moved on._

Haven _is gone._

_Nathan stands in the ruins. Houses, roads and lawns have been torn open; the earthquake a response to the loss someone who is not truly the Chief’s son shouldn’t have been able to prompt. He cannot see any bodies through the dust, but he knows that there is no one left alive underneath the rubble. No one but the only person who loved Audrey, loved Haven as much as Nathan._

_The sight of Duke, uninjured, looking out onto the destruction is the only relief given to Nathan since the Barn disappeared. Yet the presence he_ swears _he can feel brings no comfort. Audrey is gone. They failed her. Nathan failed them all. Duke is silent, already half turned away from Nathan. Nathan knows beyond a doubt that Duke will never speak or even look at him ever ag-_

“Again?” Duke mumbles from the far side of the bed. There is moonlight coming through the windows and salt water in the air. Naked, Nathan is reminded when the sound of Duke lifting up and scooting underneath a rapidly waking Audrey is different from _boxers/t-shirt/sheet_. Before he can fully process the thought, or any thought at all, his view of the room tilts. The _Rouge’s_ ceiling is suddenly closer. When Nathan looks down he can see himself half leaning against Duke’s chest and both of Duke’s arms encircling him.

Audrey settles down on Duke’s other side, breast fitting nicely against his bicep, a slender arm propped under her chin, studying Nathan’s face. She smiles at Nathan when she sees him looking at her but doesn’t inch close enough to touch. Touch has no soothing effect on Nathan after a nightmare.

Skin contact has been outside his experience for so long that he no longer understands it, not even when his brain makes the connection _touch+felt=Audrey_. The first time his haywire imagination woke them both during an involuntary camping trip, it was her scent he sought out, not the hand put on his shoulder in reassurance. It’s why he habitually turns towards Duke now that they are three to a bed. 

He might be gradually coming to know Audrey’s scent but there hasn’t been time for it to become ingrained into his subconscious, not on the same level, not like the immediate _I know you_ and _might sell me out_ but _will take me to the hospital._

Realizing Duke loved Audrey meant that for the first time since Audrey came to town – since the day when first Nathan and then Duke _saved her life_ – Nathan could really trust him with her. Nathan used to spend all that energy figuring out what the hell Duke’s motivation was, but if his motivation was loving Audrey, well, he and Nathan were on the same wavelength. And maybe, just maybe, it means he can trust Duke with himself.

Audrey has found the perfect position to start whispering in Duke’s ear. Nathan’s ears are keener than most, but he has to strain them to make out her quiet words. “So no, waitresses you’ve hired off the street are no longer allowed near the shrimp,” he hears, followed by the _scritch_ of Duke’s hair against the pillow as he shakes his head. The image of the destruction of all Nathan holds dear in life fades further and further away the longer he concentrates.

He is surrounded by Duke’s scent and the barely audible sound of Audrey’s voice and Duke’s even breaths and light chuckles above him. His eyes keep slipping closed, but he is wanted for himself on this boat, and he can see the two most important people in the world whenever he pries them open again. 

It might not stay this way. There is every chance that the most horrifying part of Nathan’s nightmare will come true.

For now, there’s still time. The three of them have already managed to slow the Hunter down. They might yet find the solution. 

For now, they’re safe.

 

.


End file.
